Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It

The happy comeback of the short story continues with Maile Meloy’s latest collection, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, which is being published this week by Riverhead. Frequently compared to Alice Munro and Annie Proulx, Meloy is a master of the form in her own right, as she proves in eleven lean, bittersweet tales of fissuring domesticity, in which disconcertingly relatable characters—daughters, husbands, friends, brothers—weigh the cozy security of their present lives against exhilarating, and often risky, possibility. Recently, I caught up with the author over E-mail. Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It is your second story collection. Your last two books—Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter—were novels. Was it refreshing to return to the shorter form after two novels? Do you have a preference—or do you want it both ways? That’s funny, and it’s true—I do like going back and forth. Flannery O’Connor said of writing stories after a novel that it was like a vacation in the mountains. You live in a novel for such a long time, and that’s the great, reassuring thing about writing them, but it’s also exhausting by the end. With stories, you can usually see your way out. So there is a freshness to it, even though you have to come up with new characters and new situations each time. And I like the discipline, the fact that everything in a short story has to count. I go back and forth between the two as a reader, too.

Many of these stories are about desire in some form, featuring characters who go to unusual lengths to pursue who—or what—they want: A shy Montana ranch hand pursues his night-school teacher across the state; a glamorous grandmother returns from the dead; a family man has an affair with his children’s former swimming instructor; a young married couple share their Christmas with hitchhikers named Bonnie and Clyde. Where do your characters come from? They sort of grow organically. Sometimes they start with a situation, or sometimes with a voice I’m trying to create or imitate, and then they take on bodies and minds from there. When I was a kid, we always went out into the woods and cut down a Christmas tree, and we always chose one that was crowding the tree next to it, so we were helping that other tree to grow. Which meant that the tree we took was always crazy-looking and lopsided, and sometimes bigger at the top than at the bottom. A family out tree-hunting, dragging a lopsided tree through the snow, seemed like a good starting point for the story “O Tannenbaum,” but I didn’t have anything more than that. They needed to interact with someone, and Montana’s a place where people give strangers in trouble a ride, so maybe they pick up two hitchhikers who’ve broken a ski. And then what? Someone asks their names, which are Bonnie and Clyde, and that seems a little creepy, but those are really their names. They’re having a fight, about the broken ski. Bonnie says, “My first mistake was marrying someone named Clyde.” And she’s sexy and appealing to the young father driving the car, who’s picked them up because you don’t leave people freezing in the snow. From that point, I try to let the characters talk to each other, and figure out what it is about this couple out tree-hunting that makes the intrusion of these particular hitchhikers so deeply unsettling—what’s the story in it, and the life-changing event? And that helps me go back and figure out who they are, this family in the car, and I go backward and forward from there. The setting is so palpable in these stories—often Montana, where you’re from, or another part of the West. What place or places are inspiring you now? Right now I’m writing a novel that’s set in London after the war, and I’ve been reading a book called Austerity Britain,1945–1951, by David Kynaston. It’s based on contemporary accounts, things people wrote and said about life in England during those years after the Blitz. There was a project called Mass Observation, which asked people to keep notes about their lives, and some of the reports come from that, and some from radio shows and memoirs. It’s completely fascinating. My husband got it for me for my birthday—seems like an odd present, but he knows me. Before that I was reading the letters of the Mitford sisters, which was similarly useful. And I’m going to London this summer, which is a close second to reading the books. What books are on your nightstand these days?Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke, which I’ve finished but haven’t put away yet because I miss it so much. It’s 850 pages long, and I feel like it was a place I went away to, and now I’m back, a little dazed. It’s absolutely wonderful. And a novel called Verdun, by Jules Romains, about World War I, that’s beautifully translated from French (which is a hard thing to pull off, I think). I’ve been making my way through it for a long time. The fact that it’s on my nightstand is slowing me down, as I don’t read in bed that much, so I’ve read many other books since I started it. I’m also in the middle of Michael Chabon’s great Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands, and I’m about to start The Tin Princess, which is the fourth and last of Philip Pullman’s Sally Lockhart novels. They’re mysteries set in the nineteenth century. I was devoted to the Trixie Belden mysteries growing up, and I think Sally Lockhart has answered a deep, forgotten need. How does it feel to go back to working on a novel? It’s interesting going back to that length, and changing the pace, after writing stories. It’s like training for a marathon after you’ve been doing sprints. It takes a while for your muscles to adjust. But it’s making me really happy.